surf, turf, oreos and gettin' jiggy

A Report from Day 3 of the Metabolic Health Summit

It’s been three weeks since the whirlwind weekend that was the Metabolic Health Summit, and I’m still trying to digest it all (so to speak). Here are some highlights from Day 3:

On Saturday, I’m afraid I slept in and missed most of the morning talks (sorry, folks). However, since they are all recorded and available through the MHS website, I plan on catching up soon, and I’ll share what I learn. I did make it for the afternoon, though, and caught some great speakers.

all about insulin

One highlight was Ben Bikman, PhD, a researcher from Brigham Young University and author of the fascinating book Why We Get Sick. He explained that it takes two things to make a fat cell grow: high insulin and extra energy. Without both, you won’t gain weight. He explained the ins and outs of how this works, and then described the big fallacy that affects all head-to-head diet studies (ie, keto vs low-fat).

It’s widely known that a low-carb diet works, in part, because carbohydrates raise blood sugar, which in turn raises insulin; get rid of the carbs, you lower insulin, and voila, fat loss. This Bikman calls the “endocrine theory” of weight loss — meaning it focuses on hormones, not calories. However, Bikman explained, all low-calorie diets will, to some degree, lower insulin, which is a huge confounding variable. The only way to truly test the two theories against one another, he says, would be a weight gain study, where insulin levels would be markedly different between a low-carb and a high-carb group, with both eating a whole lot more calories than they need. Interesting stuff. If you’ve never heard him, Bikman is truly a gifted speaker and educator — able to break down complex ideas and make them understandable and relatable. You can right away tell that he makes a real difference in his students’ lives (even if he is a Cougar).

From there, Jonathan Jun, MD, spoke about a recent study he conducted with the help of my amazing dietician, Bobbie Barron, using the ketogenic diet to treat a rare respiratory syndrome. I’m hoping to interview Bobbie soon so we can get into this one in more detail. But I swear, is there anything this diet can’t do?

Photo by Fernando Andrade on Unsplash

fruit makes you fat

Richard Johnson, MD, took the stage after that. You may know him as the person that I was mistaken for during day 1 by Dr. Maira Soliani (who had a great sense of humor about my post, by the way). He spoke about fructose, and its role in driving obesity, diabetes and dementia. This one was really interesting, because we low-carbers spend a lot of time thinking about glucose — blood glucose, specifically. His research shows that fructose is the “-ose” that we really need to worry about. It’s what “flips the switch” to survival mode and fat storage. I’m reading Dr. Johnson’s book right now, and it’s excellent, so I’ll do a more extensive post on it soon.

the oreo cookie diet?

The last presenters of that panel were Dave Feldman, a self-proclaimed “citizen scientist,” and Dr. Nick Norwitz, a PhD from Oxford (now working on his MD at Harvard) (the guy’s got “brains to burn” as my mother would say). Anyway, these two really smart guys have been working together to research something called Lean Mass Hyper Responders (LMHR).

There’s a small subset of folks who are lean, athletic, and very active (like, marathoner active), who have an unusual reaction to a low-carb or ketogenic diet. Their HDL cholesterol goes up (good). Their triglycerides go down (very good). But their LDL cholesterol skyrockets (not so good).

Or is it not-so-good? Feldman’s study, currently underway, recruited 100 LMHR folks and is following them to see if they actually develop any plaque in their arteries as a result of this high LDL. If not, this study could blow up the entire cholesterol=bad hypothesis, and the bazillion-dollar statin industry that relies on it. Because he (understandably) couldn’t get any funding for his study from big pharma, he’s using crowdsourcing for all of his work.

Norwitz then gave a rather provocative talk. A LMHR himself, he found that when he went ketogenic, his LDL went up to over 400. Again, is this a bad thing? Norwitz explained his working theory that the reason LDL levels rise is that they’re actually serving a useful purpose: delivering energy to the body. So if a LMHR adds carbohydrates back into their diet, the body will switch to using carbs for energy, and the LDL should go down. This led to what Norwitz himself called “a ridiculous experiment.”

In one phase of the experiment, Norwitz spent 6 weeks taking high-dose statin, the medication commonly prescribed for lowering LDL. In the other phase, Norwitz took no medication, but added a sleeve of Oreos per day to his otherwise-ketogenic diet. The result? Statins did lower his LDL, to the tune of about 32% (from 421 to 284). The Oreos, however, lowered it by a whopping 71%, all the way down to 111!

As he figured, the experiment made some headlines and got some attention. (“Oreos better than Statins!” How can you not click that bait?). But Norwitz explained that his purpose was not to promote Oreos, but rather to use this “dramatic metabolic demonstration” to provoke discourse around the existence of the Lean Mass Hyper Responder phenotype, which is still not widely recognized — and even sometimes derided — in the academic community.

chow time

Day 3 ended with a VIP Dinner, a fundraiser for the Charlie Foundation and the MaxLove Project. I’m glad I sprung for the ticket, because I got to see my friend and podcast guest Mary Newport receive the David A. Sherlock Pioneer Award (well-deserved!), got to meet Lily Nichols, RDN, and compare notes on our publishing journeys (her book Real Food for Fertility just dropped last week, is already a bestseller, and promises to be a gamechanger for couples hoping to conceive), and got to eat a huge portion of steak and salmon.

Now, I’ve been at many academic conferences, and even a few that have attempted a dance floor. It rarely goes well. I’m reminded of Sir Kenneth Robinson, who jokes in his TED Talk that academics “look upon their body as a way of getting their head to meetings.”

“If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night.

And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.

Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.”

That’s why it was so incredible to see, as the plates were collected and the band started up, the dance floor immediately flood with people whooping it up and having a great time. It was so much fun, subjecting these folks who I read and admire to the sorry sight of my funky dance moves. (Longtime friends will be disappointed to learn that I didn’t bust out the flopsy-mopsy. Maybe next time!) And when the clock struck 11 and the band started packing up, people began shouting “One more song!” over and over again, until the organizers indulged us by putting some Usher on the speakers.

I guess it was all those ketones rushing through our bodies.